1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a network transceiver for Ethernet communication system and a method thereof, and more particularly, to an apparatus for estimating, equalizing and demodulating of a transceiver for Gigabit Ethernet system and a method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
For an Ethernet system, a receiver to accurately receive data at a receiving-end may include the following devices: a feed-forward equalizer (FFE), a feed-back equalizer (FBE), a timing recovery (TR), an ECHO canceller, an NEXT (Near-End-Cross-Talk) canceller, etc. In order to find the appropriate coefficients of the devices, the conventional method, which is known to be a data-directed approach, is that the transceiver of the transmitting end transmits signals known by both ends to the transceiver of the receiving end and the appropriate coefficients for the devices of the receiving end are determined according to the receiving known signals.
However, according to the IEEE 802.3ab standard, a decision-directed approach is introduced to determine and/or adjust the appropriate operating coefficients of the devices. When determining the appropriate operating coefficients of the devices, the receiving signals are unknown by the receiver in advance. However, since the operation of the devices may have interaction to each other when determining the coefficients, the determined coefficients of the devices may not be converged to an appropriate value. Thus, signals transmitted by the transceiver cannot be received.
In a Gigabit Ethernet communication system, the transmission rate is up to 125 MSPS. Therefore, with consideration of chip area and power consumption, a configuration of baud-rate signal processing is adapted. Due to the Decision-Directed Adaptation and baud-rate signal processing configuration, a serious interaction appears among for example, an echo canceller and NEXT canceller and a feedforward equalizer (FFE), the FFE and the timing recovery (TR), the FFE and the feedback equalizer (FBE).
In the conventional Gigabit Ethernet systems shown in FIG. 1, slicer errors are considered as the error signal for adjusting the echo canceller and the NEXT canceller. Both cancellers are placed behind the FFE. However, the coefficients of echo and NEXT canceller may change along with the change of the coefficients of the FFE. It may cause serious interaction and the speed of the convergence of the coefficients thus becomes slower. The conventional method is to fix the coefficients of the echo and NEXT cancellers. However the performance of the Gigabit Ethernet communication system may thus be degraded.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved demodulation apparatus for a network transceiver and the method thereof to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.